Past Event

“Lapidary Practice: The Twentieth Century’s First Death Camp, William Kentridge, and the World’s Last Northern White Rhinoceros Male”

For event poster see here.

Abstract: Macaskill’s presentation circles and cycles around the insufficiently known genocide committed against the Herero nation in German Southwest Africa, locus of the first death camp in twentieth-century history. It celebrates the artistic response to that disaster by internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge, who memorializes the catastrophe in “Black Box / Chambre Noire” (2005), a beautifully and sympathetically nuanced multimedia reaction to this genocidal atrocity. Glimpsing rhinoceri now and then along its also intermedial trajectory (voice, image, music, text, genealogy too), the presentation pauses—with a sideways glance at the Shoah—over some difficulties confronting memorial commemoration in lapidary practice.

Co-Sponsored by:
Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics
Institute of African Studies
Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture